It “looks” neat, but fundamentally it is extra work. There is mass outrage on Google forums, as now there is at minimum an extra click (plus mouse movement) to sign out, switch accounts, go to settings, etc etc. Some may mock others for complaining about such miniscule extra effort, but the big question is WHY did they add this complexity? Does it actually contribute anything, or is it just pointless extra work? Was this just busy-work so someone could justify his continued employment?

I had a similar discussion with my friend today. Yes, it some operations require more clicks. But it definitely does look neat. And since Google does react to feedback quickly, you can expect them to improve on the design.

One of Gmail’s best feature is Labels. If you have the 3 labels, Bank, Receipts and Work, this is how they would appear in Gmail (ignore Junk E-mail — that’s something that Microsoft Outlook creates).

If you have configured your email client to access Gmail through IMAP, this is what you are going to see (using Microsoft Outlook 2007 as an example).

Confused? Unable to spot your labels that were so clearly visible in Gmail? Me too! More so if you have a lot more labels (I am sure most power users have more than the three labels that I use in this example 🙂 ).

There is a simple solution for this. In Gmail, edit label names and add a common prefix to all labels. In the example below, I have used the ‘~’ (tilde) character as prefix. With this change, all labels appear one after the other in the email client. No need to look through the list of folders anymore to identify labels!

But wait… There are even more ways to organize your labels and emails! In Gmail, edit label names and add a prefix followed by ‘/’ (forward slash). In this example, I have added the prefix ‘Labels/’ to each label (See image below for how it looks).

Now look at the folder structure in the email client. All labels appear under the ‘Labels’ sub-folder! Isn’t this even better?

You can take this further by creating different label structures (E.g.: Info/Bank, Shopping/Receipts, Shopping/Tracking etc.). You can even do multi-level label hierarchy (E.g.: Work/Project1/HiP, Work/Project1/LoP, Work/Project1/All etc.) — be creative here!

Note:

1. I have tested this only on Microsoft Outlook 2007.

2. I discovered the label hierarchy feature when I created a new label with a ‘/’ character in it and Outlook displayed part of it as a sub-folder.

I had question about Gmail IMAP. If I have a filter which labels an email with a particular tag will that email still appear in my inbox or it will appear in that folder in my email client (in my case thunderbird)?